Official Information Act request - Medico-legal and such like reports for ACC review purposes

This request has an unknown status.
We're waiting for Lee M. to read a recent response and update the status.

From: Lee M.

April 18, 2016

Dear Minister for ACC,

The ACC has 'deep pockets' of funds available to it in terms of its
spending power when it comes to medico-legal and such like reports
for ACC decision review purposes. By comparison, the ACC claimants are more
often than not living virtually hand to mouth on income support
paid by ACC or WINZ, or receive no income at all and are wholly
reliant on their partners/husbands/wives.

Schedule 1 of the Scale of costs and expenses on review under the
Injury Prevention, Rehabilitation, and Compensation (Review Costs
and Appeals) Regulations was last revised in 2002. It is now 14
years later and ACC claimants are really struggling to meet the
high prices being quoted by the handful of specialists who are
willing, suitably qualified and competent to produce specialised
medico-legal reports for ACC review purposes, as and when requested
by ACC claimants who are preparing to come up against the ACC and
its well funded specialists who are seemingly willing to say
anything the ACC wants to hear as long as the price is right. (An
example is that an occupational medico-legal report ordered by a
claimant recently cost $2,710.00 while a "file review opinion"
ordered by the same claimant has recently been quoted at $1,800.00
--- when this claimant is without an income and has been for more
than 5 years since suffering the injuries that are the subject of
the aforementioned reports, and the maximum claimable under the
current regulations is $935.54).

So the following Official Information Act requests arise;

1) does the ACC not realise that time has moved on, and that
claimants and their very real, and significantly increased, costs
and expenses have been left behind (while the ACC by comparison has
simply increased the amounts it is willing to pay specialists to
produce reports that it orders)?

2) when is the ACC going to increase the Schedule 1 of the Scale of
costs and expenses to meet the high prices now being quoted to
claimants as abovementioned?

3) how is an ACC claimant to achieve fairness and justice when
medico-legal reports now exceed affordability for the vast majority
of ACC claimants?

4) is it not time that the ACC stopped spending ACC levy funds -
collected through a wide range of mechanisms - on outlandishly
expensive medico-legal reports that claimants simply cannot match,
and which produce an uneven playing field that is heavily weighted
towards the ACC?

From: Lee M.

June 22, 2016

Dear John Roseveare,

Here we go ahead. Another "independent" review that will produce another report that will no doubt tell the ACC what it wants to hear and not the truth of what is causing so many claimants so much grief.

When are you going to involve claimants in the process I wonder? What good is it investigating the faults of a system that the report writer does not use and has not experienced? And if she has, no doubt she got star treatment from the ACC because of her QC credentials.

Yet another waste of taxpayers money and another pile of papers to be added to the large number of reports commissioned by the ACC and Minister for ACC over the years that has changed nothing.

I can assure you that once I am done with my claims and gone through the District Court and High Court processes, that I will be lobbying hard and long for meaningful change to this very broken, if not corrupt, system.

From: Lee M.

November 17, 2016

I also refer to the written and signed authority provided by my wife and copied to the ACC and its lawyers that empowers me to communicate with both aforementioned bodies on her behalf.

As an adjunct to my wife's original information request and your reply abovementioned, I am requesting that you post a copy hereat of Miriam Dean QC's report that you expected to receive in early June 2016.